13 January 2012 2:26 PM

Will the Coalition get to grips with the state sponsored addiction it inherited from Labour?

If anyone was in any doubt about the failure of Labour’s nationalised methadone programme, an article by pharmacist Peter Dawson in the Guardian yesterday should have disabused them. “The first task of the day in the pharmacy” he writes, “is to prepare the methadone, a little over a gallon this morning.”

One inner-city pharmacy, he goes on to say, has had to relocate to a former bank. The walk-in vault is now the "drug cupboard" to accommodate the quantity of methadone required.

Pharmacy supervised daily consumption is the mainstay of ‘harm reduction’ - the government’s response to ‘problem drug use’ treatment of the last 12 years - the result of Labour’s targeted policy of ‘gripping’ problem drug users in treatment.

Dispensing this sticky green methadone mixture – a green gunk that most addicts loathe and which rots their teeth – is the daily routine not of doctors nor of nurses but of pharmacists round the country. They get paid for the privilege of course – and to distribute clean needles too. It is the pharmacy, not the doctor’s surgery, that is the addict mother’s first port of call in the morning, her baby and children in tow.

Pharmacies might have sanitised addiction for doctors; but not for themselves.

Unsurprisingly some chose to dole the green gunk out in bulk once a week. It’s routine for ‘clients’ to collect industrial levels of 500 mls in one go to take home, risking its sale and leakage onto the illicit drug market, risking its abuse and risking their children drinking it at home. The fact that methadone deaths went up by 85% from 2005 to 2009, in places outflanking heroin deaths, hardly comes as surprise, though ironic given that one of Labour’s many targets was to reduce drug deaths.

State sponsored addiction is self defeating and ethically questionable – the cliff face to recovery made steeper. Few get better. Nearly a quarter of the National Treatment Agency’s clientele have had their ‘scripts’ for more than four years – the NTA doesn’t know for how many more. Meeting its treatment targets was all that mattered. It should have known that the value of methadone as a treatment ‘stepping stone’ diminishes after 8 months to a year.

Methadone is described as an ‘effective’ drug treatment. Effective for how long remains a moot point. It does not come cheap. In fact it costs the taxpayer a cool £3,800 per annum for every addict encouraged onto the stuff, though the methadone dispensing itself costs just £300 per annum.

As Dr Phil Peverley pointed out back in 2006 thousands of public employees make a good living out of it in the process, not least the new army of drug workers and Department of Health bureaucrats: “Prescribing for opiate addicts is like throwing petrol on a fire: pointless, counter productive, stupid, self defeating. And yet we keep doing it.” Just so.

As a result of these years of Labour largesse the Coalition is faced with an entrenched methadone, wine and welfare culture – the total cost of which adds up to some £3.6 billion a year for the 300,000 odd ‘problem drug users. For my report for the Centre for Policy Studies (Breaking the Habit – why the state should stop dealing drugs and start doing rehab, CPS June 2011) I worked out from ‘real’ datathat the annual average benefits claimed by clients ‘in treatment’ ranged between £7000.00 and £9,000.00 per annum.

The Coalition rightly wants to stop this dual dependency. It has set new policy goals of prevention and rehabilitation - to get addicts better (drug free) back to work and back to looking after their children properly. The problem is that they seem to have very little grasp of what’s involved. No more than you can teach math without a math teacher or a blackboard, can you help entrenched addicts without appropriately experienced counselors and appropriate ‘safe’ settings.

Ministers and officials seem oblivious to what is going on in the name of 'recovery'. My contacts ‘in the field’ say the new policy so far is re-branding exercise – that’s all. Routine prescribing, as described by Peter Dawson, continues across the country. The gulf between the government’s ‘recovery’ ambitions and the lack of facilities and experienced staff to handle such a change is wider than ever. For Labour’s army of drug workers are not versed in the necessary intensive counseling or equipped to run abstinence programmes.

Yet rehabs are closing every month- those very rehabs and charities that the Centre for Social Justice identified back in 2007 as leading the way in successful life restoring drug treatment. Last Friday, 6th January, it was the turn of Walsingham House in Bristol to close it doors for the last time, though Bristol is a town with literally thousands of prescribed addicts on its books who get no more than a script for their treatment. The bald fact is that since the publication of the Centre for Social Justice’s Social Justice Policy Reviews in 2006/7 the number of rehab referrals has fallen by a third – to under 4000 last year for the first time.

The problem is less with the intent of the Coalition than with the lack of appetite for abstinence based ‘non medicated’ recovery in the Department of Health. Advocacy for harm reduction – a methadone euphemism– remains powerful amongst its key drugs policy advisors.

But the three facts that these advisors ignore are: one, many addicts will decide to get better of their own accord and, unaided by free methadone, will seek out peer support and mutual aid fellowships for help; two, when addicts become so desperate as to turn to drug treatment services for help, the help they want is to get drug free; three the only treatment ‘intervention’ that recovered addicts value is abstinence based residential rehab.

Long term methadone neither serves addicts’ human rights in the long term, even less the rights of their children of whom there are at least 72,000.

Though you would not know it from the average human rights drug advocate, enshrined in the adoption of Committee on the Rights of the Child, 1989, is Article 33. It is the right of child to be protected from Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances. It states the willingness of the international community to offer protection against drugs for children.

It is the one human right that the Coalition could look to as good starting point for a reformed treatment policy.

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